Monday, December 28, 2009

There is, to reprise Avital Ronell, no off switch for the ‘post-human’. The call is always (for) you. It leaves you ringing.—Julian Yates, "It’s (for) You; Or, the Tele-T/r/opical Post-human" (forthcoming in the inaugural issue of postmedieval)

As I have been wending my various ways between Saint Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC over the past week, Craig Dionne and I have also been in the final copy-editing stages for the inaugural issue of postmedieval, slated for publication in April 2010, "When Did We Become Post/human?" We decided to try something a little different here and asked contributors to write, not full-length, heavily footnoted scholarly articles, or even full-blown essays, but rather, to engage in short [3,000 or so words] riffs and ruminations on:

a) the possible productive intersections (of any type) between studies in earlier historical periods and ongoing discourses on the posthuman and posthumanism in the contemporary humanities and sciences;

b) how certain discourses of the pre- and early modern historical periods might problematize the assumptions of a posthumanism that considers itself to be either thoroughly modern or somehow outside of history;

c) the ways in which the history and culture of pre- and early modernity help us to address and perhaps adjudicate some of the troubling questions raised by contemporary discourses on the posthuman relative to issues of embodiment, subjectivity, cognition, sociality, free will, sexuality, spirituality, self-determination, expression, representation, well-being, ethics, moral responsibility, human and other rights, governance, technology, and the like.

For a while now, most discourses on the post/human and post/humanism have been undertaken by scholars in the humanities working in the most contemporary literary and other periods [Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Bruno Latour, Judith Halberstam, Donna Haraway, etc.] or by scientists working at the leading edge of biological, chemical, computing, and other research fields who often view the humanities in general as not adequate to the task of determining the future of the human. It is not that history is viewed as irrelevant to the question of the post/human, so much as it is seen as being somehow unprepared for the question, because the world is viewed, by some, as having changed, thanks to various technological and other innovations, to such a fundamental extent, that wholly new modes of thought and even ethical practice, are required. It is our hope, with this issue, to demonstrate that scholars working in what might be termed premodern periods [medievalists, but also early modernists] have much expertise to bring to bear upon the question of the post/human, in both its material and theoretical manifestations, and also in its implications for a future that could never be entirely free of a past that, in some ways, was more capacious and theoretically provocative in its post/humanisms and post/humanist thought than we generally allow. It is my [even greater] hope that this issue will also highlight the important value of premodern studies in the (new) spaces of deliberation over the future roles the humanities might play in what is likely still to be the all-too-human yet also post/human future. In addition to the 31 contributions from scholars working in medieval and early modern studies, there will also be 4 responses from Katherine Hayles, Kate Soper, Andy Mousley, and Noreen Giffney.

I will leave you here with some snippets from the essays in our inaugural issue, in order to hopefully encourage you to read the whole shebang when it finally arrives in its entirety. I should add here, first, that the inaugural issue will be entirely available and free online, and that four full essays [by Jeffrey, Karmen Mackendrick, Julie Singer, and Scott Maisano] will soon be available for free as a preview of the issue. And if you follow postmedieval on Twitter, you will receive issue updates and links to all of these.SNIPPET PREVIEW -- postmedieval, "When Did We Become Post/human?" (Vol. 1, Issue 1: April 2010):

Refigured by the call of the ‘post-human’, I argue that we find ourselves reterritorialized in questions of form, rhetoric, genre, and translation, understood now as ways of moving, ferrying, or shifting things (persons, concepts, plants, animals) between and among different spheres of reference. When, for example, Latour issues the call for new ‘speech impedimenta’ (Latour, 2004, 62-64) or ways of speaking, Stengers studies modes of scientific authorship (Stengers, 1997), Hayles surveys modes of embodiment or the poetics of electronic literature (Hayles, 2008), or Haraway asks us to think about the mediatizing of entities by way of critter-cams, duct tape, or agility sports for the dog/person companion species (Haraway, 2001; 2008), we are being invited to try out new rhetorical and technical means by which to transform noise into news of an other. Taking the tele-t/r/opical call of the ‘post-human’ means, for us, I think, being prepared to understand our expertise in these terms, and so configuring the textual traces named ‘past’ as an archive or contact zone which may offer occluded or discarded ways of being. --Julian Yates, "It’s (for) You; Or, the Tele-T/r/opical Post-human"

The notion that we have always been natural-born cyborgs has important consequences for cultural historians. What is now often called posthumanism (together with the related viewpoint known as transhumanism), and which is predominantly -- often sensationally -- associated with the new forms of bioengineering that seamlessly integrate humans and intelligent machines, is not therefore an apocalyptic break with previous ideas of ‘the human’, but part of a continuum that encompasses the entire history of ‘the human’. Think of this temporal recalibration as one way of slashing the post/human: in this schema, the ‘post’ is simultaneously present, future and past, and the past is correspondingly folded into the ‘post’ -- and the ‘human’ is decisively relocated as an entity distinct from the Enlightenment ideal of ‘Man’, though not perhaps in the ways in which Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe imagine that relocation (Haraway, 1990; Wolfe, 1995). For we are talking here less about the forms of hybridization that Haraway invokes (organism/machine, human/animal, physical/non-physical) or about Wolfe’s quite proper concerns about ‘what kinds of couplings across the humanist divide are possible’ (Wolfe, 1995, 66) than about rethinking the architecture of the mind as it engages with an external environment. Because cultural historians shy away from the idea that anything is ‘natural-born’, it’s important to appreciate that Clark’s model is anything but a recuperation of the universal, liberal humanist subject: it fully recognizes historically-contingent forms of ‘mindware’ upgrading. The task for a newly reconfigured cultural studies is to explore these forms -- and to ask, given the bias amongst some scientists and ‘third culture’ thinkers against history, what history might add to our understanding of embedded cognition. --Ruth Evans, "Our Cyborg Past: Medieval Artificial Memory as Mindware Upgrade"

[Katherine Hayles's] How We Became Posthuman matches its rhetoric to its argument by highlighting anxiety in its cybernetic subjects as we face the prospect of disembodied humanity. Medievalists should be sympathetic since embodiment is key to the conception of full medieval personhood. Hayles reacted against a new desire to loosen the link of person to body and much speculative thinking continues to push in this direction. As contemporary science fiction shows, we can conceive a variety of technological advances that might allow intelligence to exist electronically and humans to become increasingly independent of their bodies. While some form of materiality and localized perspective seem necessary, in the future a person will be identified less by materiality or information than by understanding. The ability to recognize a being as a durable, comprehensible interlocutor will be the litmus test of the posthuman being. --David Gary Shaw, "Embodiment and the Human from Dante through Tomorrow"

Katherine Hayles’s more recent work poses the question of pre/present/post- humanness as such: How does the body know time? (Hayles, 2008). This is an inquiry applicable in so many senses to our rapidly evolving moment as we click through, log on, and interface (emphasis here on our tendency still to privilege new modes of media as space/place, not time). But it is also a question that re-frames the question of what time can mean -- in time and as time. And here we may have something timely, something new. Is it possible that critical conversations surrounding the field of new media provide new affordances for an affective reading of time as embodiment? Can these registers of affective mediation speak to what potential we might conjure in doing history? As such, how does the body know time? How does time know the body? --Jen Boyle, "Biomedia in the Time of Animation"

In this article for the inaugural issue of a new journal that strives to develop a present-minded medieval studies, I want to experiment with the pleasure of trying to let what is arguably the newest of academic fields (the first issue of the new journal Transgender Studies Quarterly will come out later than the first issue of postmedieval) speak to one of the oldest. By finding its single moment of transgendered content in William Langland’s late fourteenth-century allegory Piers Plowman, this article cannot claim to find an ancestry for contemporary transsexuals. At best, it can gesture, with the rest of this journal, towards the multiple intersecting temporalities able to co-exist and, contingently, to meet, when medievalists keep both past and present in their heads at the same time. In doing so, I hope to pass some spark of excitement between that which is marginal because long dead and gone, and that which is marginal because subject to incomprehension and oppression. The term ‘transgendered’, like the term ‘queer’, is a term conceived broadly enough to potentially include medieval people: a certain percentage of persons who describe themselves with this term live either in-between genders or in some other complex relationship with the binary of male and female. As consequence, the term ‘transgender’ has an ambivalent relationship to twenty-first-century medical technology and is more open to appropriation by and about those not entirely interpellated by its power, including, potentially, medieval people. The drawback of such an appropriation, as with that of the term ‘queer’ is that it’s an easy label that can be diluted to the point of meaninglessness, a caution that shadows my every utterance. --Masha Raskolnikov, "Transgendering Pride"

However irregularly, intermittently, or incompletely, contemporary dramatic performance increasingly refuses to be cast as print's ‘other’. The signifying forms of writing often seem less to direct the ‘languages of the stage’ than to provide one channel, and often not the dominant channel, of the discourse of theatrical performance. Theatre illustrates N. Katherine Hayles' critique of the epistemology of ‘information’; rather than taking the stage for the site of the mere reproduction of the text's ‘information’ -- as though the text inscribed ‘information’ as ‘a free-floating, decontextualized, quantifiable entitity’ (Hayles, 1999, 59) -- contemporary performance openly treats dramatic writing as an instrument that will be changed in the information it conveys by the means of its performance. Of course, to consider Shakespeare performance in this way raises the question of whether it is -- or ought to be -- conceived as a specific genre, in which performance properly works to decant textual ‘information’ by other means. This is, conventionally, the humanist, ‘stage-centered’ vision of Shakespeare performance, and of dramatic theatre more widely; it is, incidentally, a vision of dramatic performance often shared -- though differently valued -- in performance studies, too. What's striking is how laminated this understanding is to a narrow understanding of the uses of print, and of the terms of literary value and the practices of hegemony associated with print culture. For regardless of whether or not Shakespeare ‘invented the human’, the technologies of being human -- definitively, the technologies of writing, but also the conventions of acting, the framing practices of theatrical production -- are now quite differently disposed, and instrumentalize the constitution and performance of the subject in different ways. --W.B. Worthen, "Posthuman Shakespeare Performance Studies"

Thursday, December 24, 2009

I started blogging in June of 2004 because, well, all the cool kids were doing it. I posted a few times and then promptly forgot I had started a blog for a few months. When I returned, I found that a few of my posts had attracted a few comments. I had apparently stumbled into an audience--if a small one--but had no idea what to do with it.

I took my cues from mainstream bloggers, rather than medieval. (Truth be told, I wasn't really aware back then that there were other medieval bloggers, and even today I read far fewer medievalists blogs than I ought.) So at first, Got Medieval was more or less just your standard gripe blog where I vented my spleen at journalists, screen writers, tv executives, and other pop cultural figures who mangled their medieval history and all the people I met at cocktail parties who didn't know what to say when I said I was a medievalist.*

As time went by, though, I found that even expanding the enemies list to include Dan Brown, Harry Potter, Brad Miner, et al, I was running out of things that could get me worked up enough to blog. So I started working in posts on medieval things that I thought were--for lack of a better term--"nifty". And then the blog just kind of exploded and got really popular**. I wish I could identify a single turning point that could account for it. Posting about medieval beavers helped.

So did the monkeys and their butt-trumpets. And, of course, whichever post it was that bumped me to the first page of hits for "medieval porn" on Google. But by the middle of 2007, the blog started getting a lot of incoming traffic from internet coolness aggregators (your BoingBoings and such) and all sorts of unlikely places. And just as with those first comments, the sense that I had readers spurred me to find more nifty medieval things to show them.

That's where the marginalia came from, really. I knew I was going to be unavailable for a month but didn't want to leave my readers in a lurch, lest they abandon me for something niftier, so I threw together some posts and scheduled them out over the month. When I got back, I just kept at it, because people seemed to like it.

At the risk of sounding twee, if there's anything that ultimately distinguishes Got Medieval from other medieval blogs it's that I think of it as a blog written by someone who happens to be a medievalist, rather than being the product of a medievalist who happens to have a blog. I assume that my readers have some vague sort of interest in the Middle Ages, but not much more than that, and if I'm going to keep their attention I need to show them something that'll be interesting to people other than medieval scholars. Obviously, I know other medievalists are out there reading the blog, but I tend to treat them as knowledgeable eavesdroppers on the (admittedly one-sided) conversation I'm having with the wider blogosphere.

This leaves Got Medieval in a weird position. It's probably the blog that more non-medievalists would name should they ever be put on the spot and told to name a "medieval blog,"*** but it's really on the margins of the more rigorous happenings on the medieval blogs proper. As you might expect given my love of marginalia, I'm OK with that.

--

*"Oh, so after school you'll go manage one of those Medieval Times restaurants?"
**For a medieval blog, I mean. It's not like I'm Wonkette or Go Fug
Yourself or anything.
***That's the only explanation I've got for PC Magazine naming the
blog to its top 100 blogs of 2008, at least.

Check out this post by Bavardess, the starting point of which is the decision of the Victoria and Albert Museum to combine its medieval and Renaissance exhibits. Sounds like the museum is enacting something that scholars like James Simpson have been speaking about for quite some time.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Follow this link to download a PDF of the essay in which all changes to the version I published here at ITM last week are in red. What could be easier to read than red changes? Many, many thanks to all those who have made suggestions. Please let me know if I've done something other than what you intended.

Just a reminder, this essay will appear in print along with the complete Chaucer blog (actually, more than complete: new material has been added to the blog, posts never seen on the internet!). Look for the book in the New Middle Ages series in time for Kalamazoo '10. If I miss my looming deadline for submission of the final version of the essay, the Chaucer blogger will murder me using some painful method described by Dorigen in her long complaint in the Franklin's Tale. And because he is so far pseudonymous, he will get away with it.

Speaking of pseudonymity, you won't find their names in the PDF, but note the following: once the book is published, the secret identities of Another Damned Medievalist, Dr Virago, and the Chaucer blogger himself will be revealed.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

One thinks in the Humanities the irreducibility of their outside and of their future. One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not let oneself be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities.--Jacques Derrida, "The University Without Condition"

As 2009 draws to a close, the prospects for those seeking jobs in the humanities is not overly rosy, and perhaps it is even dreadful, as a recent article in Inside Higher Ed, “Disappearing Jobs” (17 Dec. 2009), indicates. And although it is often a fool’s mission to predict the future, as Jeffrey has well acknowledged in several recent posts on blogging and medieval studies, nevertheless it is difficult not to think, and worry, these days about the future (and possible demise) of many things relative to a career in the humanities: the book and other print media, traditional academic presses, the conventional classroom in which face-to-face teaching is privileged, academic literacy, literature (the short story, novel, poetry) and literary studies, historical consciousness, close and engaged reading practices, brick-and-mortar libraries and archives, and the like. We might consider, too, all of the ways in which the various ‘posts’ of the critical thought of the past twenty or so years have given us much to think about in relation to everything we are supposedly ‘after’ while still leaving the question of our present moment very much, well . . . in question. And this may be all to the good, since leaving the formulation of the present (and even of the past leading up to that present) in some suspension allows for progress and for more things to be thought, which in the final analysis may be what the humanities are ultimately for: to serve as one of the last sites of what might be called the irreducibility of thought, out of which might flow plurality after plurality of radical alternatives to whatever anyone might assert was, is, or has to be at any given moment (the humanities as factory of utopian, but also radically dissensual, contrarian, and revisionist thinking), with the literary arts, especially, serving as a rich repository of alternative universes as well as worlds we already inhabit but do not see properly or clearly enough and which cannot be fully registered or described in any other form.But even having said this, we still have to contend with various persons continually sounding the death knell of the humanities (and within the humanities, studies of the ancient past, such as medieval studies, are often given special negative attention as being more ‘irrelevant’ and even ‘useless’ in comparison with more modern fields that supposedly have more bearing, by virtue of their temporal proximity, to our ‘real lives’), and also with op-ed writers such as Stanley Fish who, although he would never argue for the dismantling of the humanities, asserts that the humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.” The thing is, he may be right—the humanities may be, as Fish avers, “their own good” (with little or no instrumental use-value), and they may even retain a certain integrity by not kowtowing to the imperative to prove their practical utility; nevertheless, this argument won’t likely help the humanities in the face of massive budget cuts that universities and colleges across the United States are currently undergoing and will continue to undergo into the near (maybe even the far) future. Even if we assert, as Bill Readings did in The University in Ruins (1996), that the humanities form an important self-critical function and maintain a unique site within the larger university for holding open the question of why we are (all) here together in the university at all, there still remains the question of the value of the special particularities of the more narrowly-defined subjects of each discipline and sub-discipline (for example, the Middle Ages, Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle Ages, medieval charters, early English ecclesiastical history, Frankish coins, Chaucer, and the like). On what basis, finally, do we defend our right to be funded to study absolutely everything and anything? More hopefully, I am reminded here of what Patricia Ingham recently wrote in her essay, “Critic Provocateur” (Literature Compass 6/6 [2009]: 1094–1108):

I prefer the line taken by Herman B. Wells, the former chancellor of Indiana University famous for defending provocative research at IU (including that of Alfred Kinsey): universities should, as he puts it, ‘‘provide for the esoteric, exotic, and impractical in the curriculum; the practical and pedestrian will take care of itself. If it does not, you have not lost much anyway; so I think the impractical things are the most practical and important in the long run.” (pp. 1103–4)

But Ingham also writes further that,

we should know by now that adjudications of relevance — like ‘‘benchmarks’’ for publishing or teaching quality or quantity — can offer ever-receding goals that we never seem to hit. We must, thus, ask how far even arguments as to our relevance will get us, particularly at a time when resources formerly allocated toward traditional humanities programs are not only moving to other units but also being redirected to Liberal Arts programs sponsored by corporate managerial interests. In this context, it seems more helpful (both in terms of strategy and tactics) to emphasize the capacity of theoretically inclined humanities research along two avenues: its ability to offer critiques of institutional discourses and the assumptions embedded in them; its ability to provide lively avenues for new research, and for the cultivation of curiosity and imagination. (p. 1104)

Here, we are back to the idea, sketched out by Bill Readings in his book, and taken up by many (including Derrida, Foucault, and Edward Said), that the humanities enact an important philosophical/critical function with respect to larger, more super-structural institutional discourses and maybe also with respect to the formation of new disciplines and modes of thought (subversively within and across disciplines). We lean heavily on the humanities’ function as philosophical and institutional provocateur at the expense, I think, of defending its more narrowly specialized knowledge domains (but how to defend those, exactly, I honestly don’t know, except with recourse to the Herman B. Wells quotation above), and I wonder sometimes if the humanities really do have special purchase on the ability to offer institutional critiques—do we really believe the scientists absorbed in their microscopes and particle accelerators are incapable of also being disciplinary, even cross-disciplinary, theoreticians of our shared, institutional situation? They also often want to pursue esoteric subjects and questions no one wants to fund. What about the social scientists whose job is often to study institutions? Do humanists, further, really have the leading edge on cultivating curiosity and imagination over any other discipline? The architecture of an orchid or a tectonic plate is as fascinating, and even as intricately demanding of the imaginative intellect, as a novel by Flaubert.

So now, somehow, we’re back to square one, and I think we have to work harder to understand and work through our dilemma—whatever that might turn out to be—in collaboration with as many researchers working in as many different areas as possible, all of whom, including us, are intimately involved with both narrowly-defined lines of inquiry as well as related, larger philosophical questions that impact upon a majority of persons situated at any one university (and beyond). These are questions that, frankly, have to do with mortality, quality of life, identity, rights, cultural practices, ethics, the cultivation of resources (both abstract and more material), democracy, freedom, justice, and the like. But, whatever the outcome of these collaborations, the whole scheme depends upon our governments (local, state, and federal) believing that funding higher education, regardless of the (hopefully) endless proliferation of its specializations (and without judging some disciplines to always be more useful than others), is a necessity no country can do without. In other words, higher education—all of it, all disciplines—has to be valued for its own sake, at whatever cost. And that is a utopic state of affairs that is doubtful in the extreme, I’m afraid.

Maybe it’s time to move somehow beyond the conventional parameters of these debates over the utility or non-utility, relevance or non-relevance, value or non-value of the humanities (which always implicitly assumes that the university as a whole somehow productively goes on, with or without the humanities, or with the humanities in diminished form), while also acknowledging that the role of the humanities within the larger university is changing in fundamental ways that threaten its historical purchase on the university’s future (which is itself shaky in certain ways), and then ask: what to do in the shadow of the (looming) end of everything? What would it mean, for example, to imagine the so-called “catastrophe” of the end of the humanities (and even the university) as a catalyst for new modes of historical, creative, and theoretical thought? What sorts of humanistic labors and thought might be possible and re-productive in the imagined site of “what happens after the end?” (which can be the end of the university but also the end of the world) and what are the very real, material outcomes that might hang in the balance of our adjudication of this imagined (dystopic/utopic) space? Or conversely, and following the thinking of Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), what sort of thinking is possible in the space of a present that refuses the future, in whatever shape, in favor of a productive negation of the idea that the humanities have any social or cultural viability at all? And what might it be possible to do and to think within a humanities evacuated of the weight of (and burden of responsibility for) the future?

Saturday, December 19, 2009

The view from our bedroom window. A record setting December snowfall has quieted our little street and Wisconsin Avenue beyond. No one walks, the flakes still falling, everything become a muffled white.

Friday, December 18, 2009

You've heard about it before. Here is the draft. Comments welcome. If you contributed and find yourself quoted, let me know if you'd like changes made to what I used. If you are listed here under a pseudonym and want your real name to appear in the published version -- or if your name doesn't appear in the credits and it should -- drop me a line.

-----------------------

Blogging the Middle Ages

Jeffrey J. Cohen and Company

Conversation, conferences, mail, journals, edited collections and monographs are the long established technologies for sharing work in progress and disseminating a “final” form for research, with each medium marking a significant stage in a project’s gestation. A typical developmental arc for humanities scholarship consists of bringing a thesis or discovery into the world via embodied interaction (from chatting to a colleague over coffee to presenting on a panel at Kalamazoo), with tentative conclusions refined and solidified through the affirmation and skepticism of interlocutors; sharing research in a slightly more formal way by requesting comments from friends or from experts not necessarily well known; submitting portions of the project to peer-reviewed forums and refining the argument in reaction to criticism; and, if all goes well, ultimate publication of the work as an essay, and then perhaps in its fullest form as a monograph. A blog (short for “web log,” that is, an ongoing record disseminated over the World Wide Web) offers a kind of ceaseless electronic conversation that may work in tandem with or might even take the place of the early stages of a project’s progress.

Blogs are internet-enabled spaces that accelerate some longstanding academic practices while enabling new scholarly modes. They do not offer the blind peer review that sanctions publication in a prestigious journal or authorizes the imprimatur of a revered press, instead providing a forum in which research and argument can be honed through swift, trenchant feedback. Unlike conference panels or hallway conversation, the reach of a blog can be vast, its audience not stratified in the ways that the academy (with its persisting love of hierarchy) tends to be. A famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner depicts a dog typing on a computer and announcing to a fellow canine, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” (July 5, 1993, vol.69 no. 20, p. 61). On a blog, no one necessarily knows or cares about your rank, your institution, your publication history. The conversation is open to strangers who happen upon the material. The risk is occasional trolling (gratuitously negative comments given for little reason other than to stir passions). The potential reward is hastening of processes that can otherwise take months to unfold, the gift of unexpected and early insight into where a project might be taken, and the possibility of combining the personal and the professional in fruitful new ways.

Like all genres, blogs have implicit rules and innate structures. Comments will always be secondary to posts; bloggers will always have a louder voice than conversants; most readers will not be contributors, so impact can be difficult to measure; brevity and wit are valued; some self-revelation and dropping of guard is expected. Like many internet-inspired phenomena, blogs lack formality and rigidity, especially when compared to conventional print. Much of what is disseminated through the medium is serious, sober, professional, and worth preserving. Much is also light-hearted, whimsical, personal and ephemeral. Blogs are inherently gregarious. Though some are nothing more than public diaries, with minimal or invisible readerships, most embrace their status as public spaces fostering communal, collegial endeavor. For that reason, I blogged this essay at the medieval studies blog In the Middle (www.inthemedievalmiddle.com) as I composed. The finished product represents a group effort. Though the person whose name appears on the byline takes responsibility for all errors, and assembled the essay from its constituent pieces, “Blogging the Middle Ages” could not have come into being without the convivial gathering a blog facilitates.

I. Early Days on the Electronic Frontier

Scholars who study texts inked onto animal skins eagerly employ electronic databases, html and other kinds of coding, digital facsimiles, ultraviolet light, and a plethora of sophisticated machines of varying sizes (scanners and pens and notebooks and cameras). This paradoxical conjoining of the ancient and the electronic is most publicly evident in the e-texts, email discussion lists, blogs, Twitter streams and websites that have become part of the contemporary practice of medieval studies. On the one hand, such tool love is nothing new. Quills and vellum are technology, after all, not markers of its absence. The millennium of Latin crammed into Migne's Patrologia Latina could not have been bequeathed to us without machinery that in the nineteenth century was at the cutting edge. Printed on cheap paper, the endeavor would not be so useful to us now were it not for electronic storage, search, and retrieval. Yet even if the discipline of medieval studies was built through and looks back to such instruments, we can still ask: Why do scholars who research a past so distant that its inhabitants could not imagine a virtual space like a blog embrace such technology themselves?

Medievalists are, among many other things, philologists: philos, "loving" + logos "word." As word-lovers we happily dedicate ourselves to apprehending Latin, Old English, Old Norse, Middle High German, Provençal, alien tongues plundered from history's solitude and revivified for communication. Computers likewise speak in arcane languages that demand translation. Is it any wonder that medievalist logophiles were early participants in conversations about technology? J. R. R. Tolkien studied (albeit briefly) to crack enemy codes during World War II. In 1982, Martin Irvine, trained at Harvard as an Anglo-Saxonist, completed one of the first humanities dissertations composed entirely on a computer – this in the days before Microsoft Word and Google Documents. Irvine and Deb Everhart are the founders of an innovative web portal, the Labyrinth, the first website hosted at Georgetown University (http://labyrinth.georgetown.edu; no longer maintained). With minimal institutional support, the site became a clearing house for the vast amounts of medieval-related material proliferating on the internet. Among the early major pages offering materials for students and scholars of the Middle Ages were the Internet Medieval Sourcebook (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html), the Online Resource Book for Medieval Studies (http://www.the-orb.net), Netserf (http://www.netserf.org), and the Monastic Matrix (http://monasticmatrix.usc.edu).[1] Most of these sites were the product of astounding, unrecompensed labor by tech-savvy individuals like Paul Halsall and Lisa Spangenberg. Several have proven transitory, ceasing to exist once the person behind them became unwilling or unable to maintain their links and content.

Though email now seems a conventional mode of scholarly communication, in the early 1990s few humanists used the medium. Medievalists were among the early adopters. Some, like Marty Shichtman and Laurie Finke, employed electronic interchange to facilitate collaborations that, had they been conducted via telephone or traditional post, would never so swiftly have yielded finished projects (e.g. Medieval Texts & Contemporary Readers dates to emails beginning in 1985).[2] Such internet-assisted collaboration likely leads to better integrated multi-authored works, since any participant can work on any part of the text at any time. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the establishment of a number of electronic mailing lists on increasingly specialized medieval subjects: ANSAX-L, ARTHURNET, CHAUCER, MEDIEV-L, MEDTEXTL, MEDFEM-L, to name a few.[3] The discussions that unfolded through these dedicated groups were often impassioned, especially when the subject was the place of those new approaches to the interpretation of literature and culture grouped under the rubric theory. Email became another space in which the culture wars endemic to the time raged. The heatedness of discussion could become a deterrent to productive conversation. Out of frustration at this lack of sustained focus was born Interscripta, a series of moderated electronic discussions of limited duration focused upon a single topic (http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/e-center/e-center.html). The inaugural foray was Jim Earl's conversation on medieval subjectivity, a discussion that deftly interwove medieval materials with philosophical reflection upon the kinds of identity flux the Internet either enabled or made evident. Later topics included "Augustine and His Influence on the Middle Ages" and "The Everyday." I moderated the concluding colloquium myself, on medieval masculinities. The email interchanges were eventually collated into a hypertext article -- and, because electronic publication was still very much a novelty at the time – I arranged for the essay to find its way into conventional print.[4] Meanwhile what it means to be “in print” was being challenged by new journals like Chronicon (http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon) and The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe (http://www.heroicage.net), both founded in the late 1990s and existing wholly online (Jonathan Jarrett, Michelle Ziegler). Add to this burgeoning number of professional sites the vast number of personal web pages, LiveJournal, Usenet groups, BBS boards, and the creation of e-texts and hypertext editions and the phrase “information overload” seems apt. Yet, as Eileen Joy reminds us:

There has always been information overload. One of my first published articles was about the efforts of 17th-century bibliographers (Humfrey Wanley, Thomas Smith, George Hickes) to catalogue all of the Saxon MSS extant in English and European libraries and even just to record the contents of Sir Robert Cotton's library … and this required a certain methodology of notation and abbreviated description that required skimming, reading things only partially but never fully. It was also quite the heroic set of labors, in which early modern bibliographers were always swimming against the tides of too little time and too many manuscripts in too many places, some just plain impossible to get to.

The internet accelerated pre-existing processes and made them more visible, even as it rendered access to the results of such labor more widely available, democratizing the field to at least some extent.[5]

In 1995 several medievalists working in Washington DC conspired to mount an ambitious conference on the future of medieval studies, “Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural Studies in Post-Modern Contexts” (http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/conf/cs95). One of the first humanities conferences with web participation integrated into its staging, the event seemed to arrive before its time, before an eager electronic audience had come into being. Though papers were posted in advance, few questions were submitted for discussion, and the conference mainly proceeded as an ordinary gathering of scholars. The live portion was intense and productive, yielding a collection of essays for the journal New Literary History.[6] Yet the web enabled the conference organizers to advertise the event widely, and then to archive its work electronically for easy access. The conference has therefore had an enduring afterlife. It is interesting to consider how different Cultural Frictions would be if it unfolded today, when blogs and Twitter are an accepted part of our medievalist praxis, when electronic publication and integration of nothing so very new.

II. A Brief History of Some Medieval Blogs

The untapped possibilities of the Cultural Frictions project have been amply activated by medievalist-run blogs, which offer the interactive sites for communication and critique that the conference had been striving to create. Among the earliest of these were Wormtongue and Slugspeak (http://michaeldrout.com) and Scéla (2002, http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/news). Both remain lively to this day. By 2005 four pseudonymous medieval blogs also were offering thoughtful posts and lively conversation: Blogenspiel, penned by Another Damned Medievalist (http://blogenspiel.blogspot.com); HeoCwaeth (http://heocwaeth.blogspot.com), Ancrene Wiseass (http://ancrenewiseass.blogspot.com; begun 2003 and now defunct); and Quod She, the creation of Dr. Virago (http://quodshe.blogspot.com). Explicitly and inspirationally feminist, these forums were instigated by authors at precarious moments in their careers, suggesting something of what the blog form offers that mainstream medievalist scholarship does not enable. Another Damned Medievalist writes:

[When] my academic career sort of took second place to family things … the connections I made to other academics in several fields [via blogs] helped to re-integrate me into a conversation that I’d really been missing for several years … Blogenspiel serves as sort of a memorial to who I was, and I think shows who I am and am becoming as an academic and as a medievalist … The blog still has one stable purpose, and that is to continue to connect with a community I respect and appreciate.

ADM also observes that blogs trace the liminal area between public and private life: “The limes is broad, and like the one following the Rhine and Danube, there is a lot of negotiation and interaction that occurs along it.” This possibility of bringing the personal so close to the professional is at once an attraction of the genre, and a reason why so many bloggers remain anonymous. Dr. Virago writes of her early engagement with blogs:

Over time I found myself equally interested in the stories [bloggers] told and the issues they wrote about, particularly on the personal or mixed personal/professional blogs of other academics. Negotiating my own life as a new assistant professor in a regional university, I started to see myself, or at least lives like mine, in these blogs. ... Reading and commenting on these blogs became a kind of substitute for the long conversations my friends and I used to have in the TA offices in graduate school, or the long e-mail exchanges I had with a few select friends both during and after graduate school.

This experience of community inspired Dr. Virago to start a blog of her own. Quod She offers “a record of how often academic professional identities become deeply personal to us, and how intertwined the threads of our complicated lives are.” Dr. Virago gets at the pleasure, companionship, and even consolation so many of us bloggers feel through our interactions with our commentators when she describes how, after she posted about her mother’s death, the mysterious Chaucer blogger offered condolences in modern day English, a touching departure from maintaining character.

Stephanie Trigg describes how a diagnosis of breast cancer transformed Humanities Reasearcher (http://stephanietrigg.blogspot.com) from a grants-oriented professional forum to space where she could talk about illness and treatment, providing information to those she knew and who worried about her and reassurance to others facing the disease. The blog became a place where she could reflect upon her experience as a patient as well as a professor, “a safe space of mediation between my study at home and the world of public interaction.” The genre’s invitation to “test the limits of my own privacy,” she writes, has been inspirational. Trigg’s Australian perspective is also a draw, especially because the medieval blogosphere is dominated by American academics. Her profoundly moving accounts, for example, of the official apologies to the indigenous people of Australia in February 2008 had little to do with humanities research or the Middle Ages, but in a way had everything to do with both.

Around 2005 two more widely read blogs had appeared, Richard Scott Nokes’s omnibus Unlocked Wordhoard (unlocked-wordhoard.blogspot.com) and the eclectic Muhlberger’s Early History (http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/MUHLBERGER/blog.htm). Both of these sites tend to be straightforwardly professional in their subject matters, both are offered as much to students at their authors’ institutions as to a wider public, but both offer moments of whimsy, humor, and personal revelation. Matthew Gabriele’s Modern Medieval (http://modernmedieval.blogspot.com) likewise began with an in-house emphasis: Gabriele teaches as Virginia Tech, and initiated the blog in response to the massacre on campus in April 2007. He writes:

My first substantial post was an expanded version of an op-ed I'd written for the local paper. I got into academia because I liked the research and the teaching but also because I believe that there's a place for public intellectuals in our society. Too often, however, academics lament that no one takes them seriously. I think part of that is our fault. The onus, to a large degree, falls on us academics to put ourselves out there and have something to say about something.

Modern Medieval has proven adept in transforming itself to adapt to changing modes of electronic communication. Larry Swain, founder of The Ruminate (founded 2003: http://theruminate.blogspot.com) and a longtime Internet presence, now co-blogs there, and Gabriel himself is one of the more prolific medievalists on Twitter. Another site to tap the synergy of blogging, stable webpages, Twitter and Facebook is Medievalists.net, the collaborative project of Peter Konieczny and Sandra Alvarez. Dating back to an internet gathering of information on military history from 2001, the website now compiles a vast amount of information relevant to the study of the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on breaking news.

Numerous blogs trace their origins to moments of career uncertainty: Dr. Virago starting a new job, Another Damned Medievalist transitioning back into teaching, Ancrene Wiseass working on her dissertation in frustrating circumstances. Jonathan Jarrett, one of the few English medievalists with a blog, observes that he initiated A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe (http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com) in 2006 because the job market was offering few prospects and the glacial pace of academic publication was inhibiting his work from being widely read:

So the choice came down to waiting forever with a bare-bones CV and a web presence basically confined to undergraduate music obsessions, and not getting a job, or to taking over my own presentation on the web and making sure that I looked like, not just a scholar, but one who was in touch with new media and outreach to the public, something which I believed and believe still is a moral obligation of our profession, especially in the UK where it is so substantially state-funded.

Jarrett admits to being ambivalent about blogging. While on the one hand the practice has sharpened his writing, enabled unexpected friendships, made his work well known to strangers, and earned him invitations to speak about his research, on the other new media are generally undervalued or even looked upon with suspicion within the British academy. Blogging, in other words, has offered few professional rewards.

I founded “In the Middle” (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com) in January, 2006. I was on sabbatical, had just finished a book, and possessed a semester without classes to teach, so I decided to try something new. Early posts included dictionary and encyclopedia entries as well as fragments from books: scholarly publications pushed into the world through a novel mechanism, but without a significant change of voice or mode. But then the comments started. Among the first to respond to my posts was my future co-blogger Karl Steel. He mentioned my infant site at Quod She, prompting the Dr Virago to send many readers my way. In the Middle took off from there. Having people respond quickly to what I e-published prompted me to write more, to take more risks with what I was disseminating, to use electronic communication to bring into being new kinds of scholarly community. I was especially interested in fostering an interdisciplinary space where hierarchies (grad student versus professor versus interested member of the public) and other sortings endemic to the profession (institutional prestige, geographic location, rank, number of publications in peer reviewed journals) were simply beside the point. I was uneasy at first about bringing much that is supposed to be segregated into private life onto In the Middle. To a degree the blog form demands it; scholars do not live in disembodied isolation; my friends and my family are my constant collaborators, whether they know that or not; and for reasons I have a hard time articulating, exploring the relation between scholarly practice and lived experience is simply important to me, and a blog offers the ideal form for such exploration. A month after starting to blog I knew that the form could be a catalyst to productivity, as well as a new mode of doing engaged work.

I have never felt a strong sense of ownership over In the Middle, wanting it simply to offer the kind of convivial, communal space the profession too often lacks. Thus I've had many guest bloggers – including, most infamously, the Chaucer blogger himself (with whom I admit to having a longtime friendship, and an early knowledge of the secret behind the identity). I had been promising that “Chaucer” would decloak and reveal himself on In the Middle, but what he did instead was to offer a brilliant account of his own blog’s genesis composed in the voice of Holden Caulfield (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/04/chaucer-speaks.html). Three of my guest writers became permanent co-bloggers: Karl Steel, Eileen Joy and Mary Kate Hurley (who has also long maintained the gorgeously written Old English in New York, http://oldenglishnyc.blogspot.com). Working with these three conspirators and friends has been one of the best results of founding ITM. Together we have experimented with what the blog can accomplish: book reviews, a forum for syllabus exchange, conference reviews, book clubs, ephemera, manifestoes, rants, raves, obituaries, and preludes to print. ITM's readership has steadily grown. At the moment we have 240 subscribers through Google Reader alone, 60 fans via Facebook, 434 additional visits to the blog each day. In the Middle reaches many more people than any book or essay I could ever compose. I have often stated that much of my pre-blog scholarship has been a series a letters written to unknown receivers, a lonely position from which to write. What I love about In the Middle is that the blog reminds me every day of the community for whom I compose, a community of which I am proud to be a member.

III. Future Frontiers

Nobody gets the future right, except in retrospect. Then again, no one seems to get “the present and past right, even when its artifacts are all around you” (Eileen Joy).

Some time ago I asked if Facebook had killed Blogger (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/10/did-facebook-kill-blogger.html), by which I meant: have social networking sites diminished the impact of and necessity for blogs? The question's importance is tied not only to what the years ahead hold for academic blogs, but for their audience and outreach as well. Blogs are composed in part for the communities that form around them. The best posts are those that spur lively and sustained conversation. Nothing surpasses having an unexpected interlocutor arrive, someone who can bring the discussion in productive new directions. Blogs also exist as much for their silent readers than their garrulous ones: of the 240 people currently subscribing to In the Middle via Google Reader, probably no more than 35 have ever actually left a comment. The blog surely has some tangible impact upon its silent readers, perhaps in the classes they teach, the articles they write, the projects they pursue. Add in those who peruse the blog just by stopping by, those who subscribe via another service like Bloglines, those who use Facebook or some other site to access the RSS feed, and it seems evident that most people treat a blog like an informal version of a journal: a place for news, a chuckle, a disapproving cluck of the tongue, a quick morning skim ... and sometimes a place with some material to linger over, think about, respond to.

I worry about the relocation of much of what used to unfold on blogs to social media because those discussions are inherently closed: limited to the friends one already possesses; never stumbled upon due to a fortuitous web search; not existing as a semi-permanent, easily accessible archive in the way that a blog's thread of comments persist (and because they persist, blog comment threads can be reawakened after long dormancy; such reactivation cannot happen on Facebook). It could be argued that no technology actually supplants another: print books and e-books are not at war, but are coexistent phenomena. By this reasoning Facebook will not replace Blogger; we will have both, and different modes of communication will unfold on each: sustained, in-depth, archived and open access discussion on blogs; quick, superficial, fly-by conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Maybe. Yet few of us are reading microfiche these days. Another possibility is that a cloud metaphor best describes the interconnected electronic future. Twitter and FB can be used to direct readers to blogs via the quick dissemination of links via multiple outlets (personal profiles, blog fan pages, tweets, and old fashioned homepages). Thus Eileen Joy writes:

I don't see Facebook as draining either content or persons away from weblogs, so much as they serve as yet another portal to particular blogs and blog posts, via "News Feed" links and the like ... I started a Facebook page for the BABEL Working Group because I thought it would be a good way to disseminate sound-bite-style information regarding conference sessions, journal issues, books-in-progress, and so on, but if I wanted to send a message to the widest possible audience with a certain amount of detailed substance involved, I would still consider this weblog the best and most effective medium for doing that. For the most part, Facebook, as powerful and widely used as it is, is still mainly a medium for very fast & quick communications and networking between real friends and acquaintances and would-be-acquaintances and for sharing personal information in the form, again, of nugget-sized "bits."

I'd mostly agree with this account. Facebook is best for quick, terse, multimedia communication. But I and many of my FB friends have been employing the site -- as well as Twitter -- for interactive and sometimes substantial exchanges about topics that have in the past typically unfolded in the more public forum of In the Middle: pedagogy, bibliographic searches, uses of technology, recommendations for texts, and discussion of books and articles. I think especially about a recent conversation that unfolded around Patty Ingham's important new essay "Critic Provocateur” (Literature Compass 6.6, 2009: 1094–1108). The piece was shared and discussed wholly within Facebook, catalyzed by a status update by Eileen Joy mentioning that she was reading the essay. I complained through my own status update that Literature Compass is not open access. The essay was then provided to me via multiple sources, I shared the PDF with others, and multiple status updates about the essay appeared posted by various medievalists. Comments were posted at these updates. The essay triggered a conversation that was abbreviated in the way that the genre requires, but the dialogue had enough weightiness to it that (as I participated in it and watched it unfold) I was aware that yes, Facebook really has taken on many of the functions that had been the provenance and domain of blogs.

So what's next? Despite the "information wants to be free" ethos of the early internet, it seems clear to me that much scholarly work that ought to be available is going to vanish behind the wall of limited social networks (where the unexpected guest cannot be inspired by what she did not expect to find) and corporate sites that reserve their content for research libraries that can afford their extortionate access fees. But not all of it: open access journals are not in decline, and the day will come (I hope) when their cachet equals that of those we pay publishing megacompanies to sanction for us. E-books should make access to writing done under the imprimatur of peer review at "good presses" easier to get hold of. Medievalists are a techno-savvy, generous and adaptive bunch. Their work is not going to vanish from the internet any time soon.

Meanwhile the next generation of humanities scholars may not be quite as enamored of text as we currently are, leading to more work undertaken within and published as multimedia. I don't have the technological proficiency to create a YouTube channel, but other medievalists will no doubt do so. I am also, I realize, already old fashioned: structuring my courses around writing and analysis that take textuality as central. I don't especially enable my students to collaborate as part of the learning process; I don't yet care if they would rather produce a video response to Marie de France than a paper based upon textual evidence and close reading. I talk frequently about new critical modes but insist that students master the old ones before they attempt them. Some day I may be one of those emaciated figures seen lurking in the moldering remains of some abandoned academic program, muttering about how declines in Latin proficiency have triggered the pedagogical apocalypse. I worry that the shifts in resources undertaken by increasingly corporatized universities will diminish the longterm health of the humanities, and make fostering the next generation of researchers and teachers a dead-end endeavor.

The future of scholarly communication will likely mean that the technologies I have been using (traditional print books, blogs, Twitter, FB) will be superseded. The future will arrive, and may well leave me behind, just like those for whom the be-all and end-all of scholarship was e-texts, CDs, or microfiche. Maybe the university will always be a location where face-to-face encounter within the humanities classroom will be prized. Maybe the Chaucer blog will always inspire those who have not taken a course in Chaucer to take one, and those are taking such a course to find a new way to enjoy and learn from the materials. But it is also possible that by moving so much scholarly interaction online we make it easy for those who make decisions about educational policy to hire fewer humanists, to argue that the electronic pedagogical frontier is in fact the most viable one. I'd like to think that blogging and its siblings are ways to make a case for the vitality and importance of contemporary humanities education. They enable and preserve conversations about what is at stake in what we do, and they challenge us to think seriously about how we do it, and for what future.

Jonathan Jarrett surveys some of these pioneering – and now often outmoded, inaccessible, and unavailable – sites and technologies here: http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/medieval-latin-and-the-internet-twelve-years-on/

[2] Facebook communication from Marty Shichtman, November 4 2009. The book was published by Cornell University Press in 1987.

[3] Medievalists were not, of course, the first to the internet, as the lively discussion group “Humanist” (founded 1987, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist) makes clear (Sarah Rees Jones).

[4] Hypertext article here: http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/e-center/interscripta/mm.html; print version published as "The Armour of an Alienating Identity" Arthuriana 6.4 (1996) 1-24.

[5] “The digitising of original sources means grad students (and even senior undergrads) who are not on the American or European continents can pursue research on material that could previously only be reached after spending thousands on international airfares. At my own university, a glance at the library's catalogue of history dissertations and graduate research exercises shows a clear increase in medieval (and early modern) topics, and I'm sure this is made possible in part by sites like the Medieval Sourcebook, EEBO and various national archives like Gallica” (Barvardess).

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Via Jeffrey's Twitter account, look out for Anne Rice's Angel Time, in which an angel offers redemption to a young federally-funded assassin if he travels back in time 700 years and saves a Jewish family from a ritual murder accusation. The review states: "Though the segue from modern-day America to the 13th century seems abrupt and awkward": well, I should hope so! (the same review summarizes the backstory further: "A family tragedy on the day of his high school graduation turns him into a killer. He's a government assassin who operates, seemingly, without a conscience": at first I sneered at the cheapening of redemption...why redeem him if he's a killer only because of an accident, or because the government funds him? Doesn't that cordon him from his crimes? I've now decided that Rice offers redemption from an accident and a vague and great power the only way she can: via further accidents (time travel) and a vague and great power (angels), all to intervene in (medieval and modern) lives caught up, through no fault of their own, in murderous narratives. Ok: I'm sold. Now find me a beach or some other material space signifying "leisure" so I can justify reading it).

Moving on from Rice's Repetition Compulsion into my own abrupt and awkward transition.... I capped my MA Intro to Theory for High School Teachers course with Caryl Phillips' The Nature of Blood. I can heartily recommend this for any reader interested in the interfoldings of time (e.g., fans of Jonathan Gil Harris's Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare). In a novel moving back and forwards in time, through a variety of voices, some personal, some institutional, Phillips rewrites and recalls:

the Anne Frank story, via Eva Stern, who is deported first to a ghetto, then Auschwitz (where she holds on to a kind of life as a sonderkommando), then Bergen-Belsen, then, liberated, to England, where she may or may not kill herself: no wonder that Phillips, by questioning in what sense anyone could be said to have survived the Holocaust, rewrites Anne's famous line as "You see, Eva, in spite of everything that we have lost, they still hate us, and they will always hate us";

the life of a certain famous Moorish general heading the Venetian military ("the lady declared," says this general, "that she wished to know principally of my adventures as a soldier and of the many dangers to which my life has been subjected. She listened intently, and I spun some truthful tales"), but only up to a point;

and, in the midst of all this, a fifteenth-century ritual murder case, first at Portobuffolè, and then to its horrific culmination at Venice.

Note what Phillips does here:

Half-way across the square, Servadio, the chief conspirator, was seen to whisper to his companions. Then he lifted his eyes and began to pray aloud:

'My God and God of my Fathers, the soul that you gave me was pure, innocent and clean, but I contaminated it and made it impure with my sins. Now the hour has arrived for my life to be taken away, the hour in which I will give up my soul to Your hand to sanctify Your name. Take my soul when I go.'

This said, Servadio now openly encouraged his colleagues to pray, but they could only succeed in mumbling, 'Amen, Amen.' As they approached the wooden scaffold, Servadio's fellow Jews could not continue walking, and two soldiers were forced to take the Jew cowards under their arms and drag them forwards. Once the three Jews were under the scaffolding, the bell of the Cursed stopped chiming. Servadio, however, continued to pray. The people did not understand what he was saying, and some thought that perhaps he was making honourable amends. Even when they hoisted him up and on to the scaffolding, Servadio continued to pray.'Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.'

Who is speaking here? Who observing? What is our position in relation to the ritual murder? At times, Phillips writes in the voice, it seems, of Christian Venice itself (the "Jew cowards"), at times in the voice of someone who knows what must be Hebrew, and thus knows and understands more than the Christian crowd of witnesses ever could know. Where are we modern readers in here, particularly those of us descended from European Christians? Where is our good conscience, our enjoyment in reading (for leisure? for study) and thus recreating such a scene?

By all means, take the opportunity of the Winter Break to read the novel and get back to me on these questions.

Monday, December 14, 2009

It's that most wonderful time of the year, by which I mean of course the time to prepare next Semester's syllabi. I'm teaching just the one course, described below:

English 791X, “Saints, Monsters, and Animals in the Middle Ages”

“For anyone who doubts that a horse is by its very nature better than wood, and that a human being is more excellent than a horse, should not even be called a human being.”Anselm, Monologion

This seminar will explore the multiple edges of humanity as it abuts on, and mixes with, the super-, sub-, and extrahuman. Course readings will treat a wide range of literatures, ranging from the era of the Roman empire through Early Modern writers like Montaigne. Readings will concentrate, however, on works of the Middle Ages, including narrative, church doctrine, and law: these include considerations of the nature of the human by Augustine and Aquinas, a ninth-century letter on dog-headed humans, a twelfth-century account of a dog revered as a saint, and several stories of saints that have left behind human civilization; we will also read in secondary, theoretical material, including Critical Animal Theory, Ecofeminism, and Posthumanism: philosophers of interest will include Ralph Acampora, Carol Adams, Matthew Calarco, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe.

I have 20 students, 15 classes to fill, each 90 minutes long, and I'm looking for advice from the many of you who have taught similar courses, sometimes multiple times. Here's a possibility for now:

Monstrous Progeny: Melusine and Other Monsters from Geoffrey of Auxerre's Apocalypse Commentary; Gerald of Wales on Werewolves and Cowboys; Green Children

Yvain [suggestions on translation? I don't want the Cline, nor do I want a Chrétien omnibus; ideally, I'd like an OF/English facing page, but I don't think that exists]

Either Albina and Her Sisters or Lydgate, 'Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep'

Weeks 12-15: Secondary Reading + Presentations

What are your suggestions? What would you swap out? What does a course like this absolutely need? Currently, I think its chief impediment is its anthropocentrism, but I locked myself into that with the course description: next time, I'll try for a more strongly ecocritical and nonhuman angle.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

After almost four years, my time as chair of the English Department of the George Washington University nears its termination.

I'll miss it. Having the chance to get to know my colleagues so well, learning how much their friendship means, having the ability to help them when problems arise, being in the middle of things: all of these are hard to leave.

My position as chair has offered plenty of fodder for this blog (election! memos! bungee cord chair! refusal of a second term! cash infusions! famouswriters! take your child to work! strategy! annoyances! creativity! stages and spotlights and lecterns! And so on). But that is not why -- no it really is not why -- I took it. I believe that one loses the right to complain about an entity if, when given the chance to work to change its structure, one declines. So now I have earned the right to whine, bleat and carp until the crack of doom. Colleagues, beware: I will be that infamous faculty member who routinely harrumphs "Well when I was chair we used to find wads of cash in our desk drawers and the queen flew us to England for marmalade-smeared crumpets and we never fought and we had no problems and rainbows shimmered all the day long." Sweet, it will be, repeating my nostalgic lies.

Now I am slowly packing my books for the move to my new digs. I'll miss my office, with its beautiful view of I Street and prospect of Pennsylvania Avenue and passing popes. I'm descending from the seventh to the sixth floor, mainly to be out of the way of the new chair: she doesn't need a whining, bleating and carping former chair hanging around to tell her about how things were in his day (see above). Besides I find it so much more fun to sabotage her behind her back. And when she looks at the budget and beholds the hole I've dug for her ... well, let's just say that the fiscal austerity that I've compelled her to enact is going to make my reign look like the golden age by contrast. Trivia: no chair in GW's history has ever -- so far as I can tell -- expended so much of the department funds on wine and champagne.

Monday, December 07, 2009

What happened to November? Here we suddenly stand on the little work-swept isle of December 7, the tsunami of term's end raises the water level, and I am now feeling that the previous month was short a week. Or two.

Some time ago I wondered here at ITM if Facebook had killed Blogger, by which I meant: have social networking sites diminished the impact of and necessity for blogs? The question's importance is tied not only to what the years ahead hold for academic blogs, but for their audience and outreach as well. Blogs are composed in part for the communities that form around them. The best posts are those that spur lively conversation. Nothing's better than having an unexpected interlocutor arrive, someone who can bring the discussion in productive new directions. Blogs also exist more for their silent readers than their garrulous ones: of the 236 people currently subscribing to ITM via Google Reader, probably no more than 36 have ever actually left a comment. I do not think I am being naive in believing that the blog has some minimal but tangible impact upon such readers, perhaps in the classes they teach, the articles they write, the projects they pursue. Add in those who read the blog just by stopping by, those who subscribe via another service like Bloglines, those who use Facebook or some other site to access the RSS feed, and you will see that most people treat a blog like an informal version of a journal: a place for news, a chuckle, a disapproving cluck of the tongue, a quick morning skim ... and sometimes a place with some material to linger over, think about, respond to.

I worry about the relocation of much of what used to unfold on blogs to spaces like Facebook because those discussions are inherently closed: they are limited to the friends one already possesses; no one stumbles across these materials due to a fortuitous Google search; the discussions do not exist in a semi-permanent, easily accessible archive in the way that a blog's thread of comments persist (and because they persist, they can even be reawakened after long dormancy; that doesn't happen on FB).

It could be argued that no technology actually supplants another: print books and e-books are not at war, but are coexistent phenomena. Facebook will not replace Blogger; we will have both, and different modes of communication will unfold on each. Maybe. But you know, very few of us are reading microfiche these days. Another possibility is that the computing-derived cloud metaphor I used in the Blogger v. Facebook post really does hold: Twitter and FB can be used to direct readers to blogs via the quick dissemination of links via multiple outlets (personal profiles, blog fan pages, tweets, and old fashioned homepages). Synergy. Thus Eileen wrote:

I don't see Facebook as draining either content or persons away from weblogs, so much as they serve as yet another portal *to* particular blogs and blog posts, via "News Feed" links and the like ... I started a Facebook page for the BABEL Working Group because I thought it would be a good way to disseminate sound-bite-style information regarding conference sessions, journal issues, books-in-progress, and so on, but if I wanted to send a message to the widest possible audience with a certain amount of detailed substance involved, I would still consider this weblog the best and most effective medium for doing that. For the most part, Facebook, as powerful and widely used as it is, is still mainly a medium for very fast & quick communications and networking between real friends and acquaintances and would-be-acquaintances and for sharing personal information in the form, again, of nugget-sized "bits."

I'd mostly agree with this account: FB is best for quick, terse, multimedia communication. But I and many of my FB friends (Karl especially) have been employing the site -- as well as Twitter -- for interactive and substantial exchanges about topics that have frequently unfolded here at ITM: pedagogy, bibliographic searches, uses of technology, recommendations for texts, and discussion of books and articles. I think especially about a recent conversation that unfolded around patty Ingham's important new essay "Critic Provocateur." The piece was shared and discussed wholly within FB. Its catalyst was a status update by Eileen mentioning that she was reading the piece. I complained via status update that Literature Compass is not open access. The essay was then provided to me via multiple sources (including its author), I shared the piece with others, and multiple status updates about the essay were posted by various medievalists. Comments were posted at these updates. The essay triggered a conversation that was abbreviated in the way that the genre requires, but the dialogue had enough substance to it that (as I participated in it and watched it unfold) I was aware that yes, FB really has taken on many of the functions that had been the provenance and domain of blogs.

So what's next? Despite the "information wants to be free" ethos of the early internet, it seems clear to me that much scholarly work that ought to be available is going to vanish behind the wall of limited social networks (where the unexpected guest cannot be inspired by what she did not expect to find) and corporate sites that reserve their content for research libraries that can afford their extortionate access fees. But not all of it: open access journals are not in decline, and the day will come (I hope) when their cachet equals that of those we pay publishing megacompanies to sanction for us. Ebooks should make access to writing done under the imprimatur of peer review at "good presses" easier to get hold of. Medievalists are a techno-savvy, generous and adaptive bunch. Their work is not going to vanish from the internet any time soon.

Meanwhile the next generation of humanities scholars may not be quite as enamored of text as we currently are, leading to more work undertaken within and published as multimedia (here is a piece from Inside HigherEd on that shift and its possible impact on the undergraduate classroom). I don't have the technological proficiency to create a YouTube channel, but other medievalists will no doubt do so. I am also, I realize, already old fashioned: structuring my courses around writing and analysis that take textuality as central. I don't especially enable my students to collaborate as part of the learning process; I don't yet care if they would rather produce a video response to Marie de France than a paper based upon textual evidence and close reading. I talk frequently about new critical modes but insist that students master the old ones before they attempt them. Some day I may be one of those emaciated figures seen lurking in the moldering remains of some abandoned academic program, muttering about how declines in Latin proficiency have triggered the pedagogical apocalypse. I worry that the shifts in resources undertaken by increasingly corporatized universities will diminish the longterm health of the humanities, and make fostering the next generation of researchers and teachers a dead-end endeavor.

The future of scholarly communication will likely mean that the technologies I have been using (traditional print books, blogs, Twitter, FB) will be superseded. The future will arrive, and may well leave me behind, just like those for whom the be-all and end-all of scholarship was e-texts, CDs, or microfiche. Maybe the university will always be a location where face-to-face encounter within the humanities classroom will be prized. Maybe the Chaucer blog will always inspire those who have not taken a course in Chaucer to take one, and those are taking such a course to find a new way to enjoy and learn from the materials. Synergy, again. But it is also possible that by moving so much scholarly interaction online we make it easy for those who make decisions about educational policy to hire fewer humanists, to argue that the electronic pedagogical frontier is in fact the most viable one. I'd like to think that blogging and its siblings are ways to make a case for the vitality and importance of contemporary humanities education. On my darker days, though, I worry that once that future frontier is reached, what we'll find is not appreciation for such efforts, but a cold and startling indifference.